All Passion Spent (VMC)

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I enjoyed this one very much, and as I said above, I like to put a novel in the context of it’s time. I love how he reflects that the beauty in her face has changed, developing into something richer and deeper than youthful beauty. She however surprises them all by deciding to live on her own in a house she'd spotted years earlier, and settling in a quiet life surrounded by a few confidants, avoiding the limelight and the attentions of her greedy and mean-spirited children unable to see their mother's true needs.

This landscape vision provides Lady Slane with the structure and language she needs to understand her past life—to see the patterns as well as to encircle it as a unified whole. All is quiet, even tinged with a little glamour, freedom, independence, romance, and the putting away of trivialities.Victoria (Vita) Sackville-West (1892-1962) began writing, and began taking women as lovers, while still at school.

And so they put another set of expectations in train, believing their dutiful mother will see the merits of the plan. After almost seventy years of conforming to every wish of her just-deceased husband, she decides to live her remaining years to her own liking, “calm of mind, all passion spent. Holland, at an astonishingly early age, had occupied a seat in the Cabinet, to this very last day when as Earl of Slane, K. Seventy years later, released by widowhood, and to the dismay of her pompous children, she abandons the family home for a tiny house in Hampstead.Milton defines Samson’s act of heroism as spiritually inspired but also dependent on the physical violence of the crashing pillars. edition, hardback, 8vo, 294pp, owner's initials dated 1932 on endpaper, edges brownig, otherwise clean and sound, mauve cloth, black titles, spine slightly faded, corners slightly bumped; overalll Very Good condition / no dustwrapper. She was the one who caved in to pressure to bring them up in a way the world would approve, but then decides she doesn't gel with the hoop-jumping people they grew into. But one was happy at one moment, unhappy two minutes later, and neither for any good reason; so what did it mean?

First she defies the patronizing meddling of her children and escapes to a rented house in Hampstead. This is a book that looks at the position of Victorian and Edwardian women and foresees the changes in status to come. I’d read lots of it, at university, but I didn’t really have a language to talk about it though I must have written essays about it or I wouldn’t have passed with high distinctions. Of course, most of us have no Genoux to care for our less delectable functions, to wash and dress us, and minister to our ever-more-demeaning physical failings. The poet, novelist, and gardener Vita Sackville-West was not yet forty when she wrote her novel, All Passion Spent, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1931 and reissued by Virago in 1983.Irreverently funny and surprisingly moving, All Passion Spent is the story of a woman who discovers who she is just before it is too late. They took a step forward, and from having always thought her simple, decided that old age had definitely affected her brain. What an irony that going with the flow, and taking the path of least resistance, may be the biggest energy sapper after all. I want to “do” Mrs O but only once I’ve finished at least one set of Trollope, which isn’t going very fast at the moment. Her children plan to share her care between them much as they divide up the family property but, completely unexpectedly, Lady Slane makes her own choice, proposing to leave fashionable Kensington for a cottage in suburban Hampstead that caught her eye decades earlier, where she will live alone except for her maidservant and please herself — for example allowing her descendants to visit only by appointment.